Suspect in Milton killing arrested 19 years later

The suspect in the 1995 homicide case, picked up in a traffic stop in Pennsylvania, was wanted in connection with a body found in Milton.

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

MILTON – John King was just two months out of the police academy, working a Christmas shift, when an unusual call came into the Milton police station: A young couple, recently engaged, said they’d found a dead zebra that looked like it had been hit by a car behind the fire station.

Expecting to find some kind of animal, perhaps a deer, King drove down to Walnut Street and instead came across a large object that had been wrapped in a zebra-print blanket and dumped by the side of the road. With the young couple waiting by his cruiser, King peeled back the blanket and sheets of plastic to find a dead man inside.

Now, nearly two decades later, the man police believe to be a suspect is in custody in another state.

Within days of finding the bloodied body of 23-year-old Rolando Coxon on Christmas Day in 1995, police thought they had identified his killer: a Jamaican immigrant named Joslyn A. Bailey. And, until his arrest for a traffic violation last week, Bailey has managed to elude authorities for more than 18 years as the young police officer who first investigated the Coxon killing rose through the ranks to lead their department.

“It was my first homicide,” said King, now the deputy chief of the Milton Police Department. “I’d literally been on my own for about two months.”

The sudden appearance of Coxon’s body in Milton’s historic center – within a stone’s throw of town hall and dozens of homes – prompted a fast-paced investigation that led police within days to a gruesome crime scene in a Mattapan apartment. By the end of the year, police decided that Bailey was their man, but for nearly two decades they were unable to find him. For many, the gruesome crime faded from memory.

That changed last week when the Pennsylvania State Police announced that Bailey, now 48, had been stopped for a traffic violation on Interstate 78 and was being held without bail in a Lehigh County prison. Boston police are now working to extradite Bailey from Pennsylvania to face charges – outlined in an arrest warrant that has sat in Dorchester District Court for nearly two decades – of murder and unlawful possession of a firearm.

Most law enforcement officials declined to answer questions about the murder investigation this week, saying they do not want to interfere with Bailey’s prosecution. That includes perhaps the most pressing question: Was Bailey acting alone when, as police allege, he gunned Coxon down, wrapped his body in plastic and a zebra-print blanket, and dumped it in a quite Milton neighborhood? Or did he have an accomplice?

Sgt. Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Boston police, said Friday that the department’s homicide unit would not be commenting on the investigation. At the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office, spokesman Jake Wark said prosecutors were working with Pennsylvania officials to extradite Bailey to Massachusetts, but he could provide no other information about the case.

Wark said the extradition process “can be quite lengthy” and that no date had been sent for Bailey’s arraignment in Boston.

The Blue Hills Reservation, with its acres of secluded woods and hiking trails just to the south of Milton, had earned a reputation in the early 1990s as a place where bodies could be discretely dumped. But the sudden appearance of a murdered man in the town center, less a block from two white-steepled churches, shocked neighbors and prompted law enforcement officials to declare, even before the crime scene was discovered, that Coxon was almost certainly killed in Boston and dumped by someone who got lost trying to find the reservation. Days after the murder, Milton police officers went door to door in the neighborhood with fliers assuring residents that the murder was an isolated event and had no connection to Milton.

“This appears to be a very deliberate attack, and the victim probably knew the assailants,” then-police Chief Kevin Mearn told The Patriot Ledger at the time. “All leads point outside the town of Milton.”

Within days of the discovery of the body, the Ledger reported that friends of Coxon, a father of four known as “Ricky,” believed the young Jamaican immigrant had gone with three men to a house on Christmas Day and never came back. On Dec. 28, three days after Coxon’s body was found, police searched an apartment on Delhi Street in Mattapan that Bailey had been renting and seized a semi-automatic rifle, bullet fragments and a piece of blood-soaked carpet.

At the time, Lt. Richard Wells, now the chief of the Milton Police Department, told The Patriot Ledger that investigators had found “significant amounts” of blood in the apartment, as well as duct tape and plastic similar to the material used to wrap Coxon’s body. The next week, police said they had received a warrant for Bailey’s arrest.

Investigators at the time said they believed at least one other person was responsible for the killing. On a Boston police report filed in the Dorchester court nearly two decades ago, a line that reads “number of perpetrators” is followed only by the word “unknown.”

And nearly two decades after he came across the body of Rolando Coxon as a young police officer, Deputy Chief John King had little to say about what the arrest means for him personally.

“It’s just kind of the nature of the business,” he said.

Contact Neal Simpson at nesimpson@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @NSimpson_Ledger.